Oh no, I whisper to myself. I’m back here again. Back here in this physical location, back here in this mental landscape, back here in this emotional home. The words back and forward, like big and small, are unnecessary contradictions that leave us lost. A big moment in a lifetime can be a small moment, comparatively; going backwards is also going forwards, because we’re always moving and changing. Big, small, backward, forward. Same.
When I get to a place where I feel I have regressed, I think of a spiral. Fractal creation, winding itself around and around; what seems like I’ve been here before is actually elevation, similarity with distinction.
This morning, I woke up three hours late with some stomach pain, lingering grogginess, and a mind ready to jump on any thought. With movements calculated and strategic, I forced myself forward, and did the things I do in the morning: the yoga and the breathing, the brushing of teeth (oh wait, I haven’t done that yet), the taking of the vitamins, the eating, the reading. And yet, I felt I was fighting off this dark demon of a spirit, something I’ve seen in dreams and in ceremonies, a shadowed figure lingering and rocking back and forth, forth and back. The shadow side.
What does it mean to get to know our shadows, the shadow that lies between the lines of the spiraling shells of our lives? I think it means to be honest, radically honest, and compassionate about what we want, need, and dream for ourselves. I’ve been reading a lot about pleasure lately, both in the words of Inga Muscio and adrienne maree brown. I find, after dousing myself in mantras of giving and receiving, that pleasure, savoring, and being satisfied is something I knew so innately when I came into this world, and something I have been spiraling desperately backward-forward to remember. The power of a spiral, of course, is that we never go back; simply onward. What we think is a revisit, to a state of depression, to a question of purpose, to a loneliness, to a yearning, is actually elevated, a different dance around the sun. We’ve learned and breathed in more than when we were here last time; so, inevitably, we are changed, and so has the situation.
Pleasure as a child was sweetness. It was play and imagination, dresses borrowed from my mom’s box of old bridesmaids’ gowns. It was barbies and beanie babies, it was running and smelling flowers. It was learning the tenderness of sexual pleasure, with baby doll heads and stuffed animal noses, and realizing that those shivers and chills that would radiate through my small body were something sacred and holy. Also, something not very well understood in my family upbringing.
Pleasure, sexual pleasure, was taught as something meant to be disguised, tucked away, hidden in a closet, rather than celebrated in the open.
Spiral. I move into other forms of play and pleasure, of movement in athletics, of feeling my body long and lean running through the desert sun. I feel the pleasure of sweat, salty and sweet, on my skin, and the joy of kissing my shoulder or my knee. I learn the pleasure of being held by someone I love, of letting my body sigh more than I realized it could, of dreaming up new ideas and letting my fingers dance them into existence on a keyboard or scrawl them into reality with a pen. The breeze of the mountains, the shift from stuffed to vibrational toys, the learning to express myself with questions. To taste what my voice tastes like.
The growing up and growing into pleasure is lifelong, I believe. It also takes time to heal the woundings that have changed my understanding of that pleasure.
What does it mean if pleasure feels unattainable; who do I trust to co-create pleasure with me? How do I create genuine pleasure for and with myself? These questions, of healing and loving, are universal, and I think particularly shared amongst women.
The more I read of powerful black women, resistance fighters and revolutionaries, healers and writers, mothers and sisters, I think of the women I know in my own space of whiteness who have harnessed and used their power for the greater good. There are certainly some, and yet, they, and I, hold power in a different way than our black sisters on this country. I think white women hold and learn and wield power in the way of those who have inherited. For me, it can lack a sense of urgency, or take more time to incubate, because of the necessity of claiming that power is tempered by the comfort of a white supremacist society. We, white women, have already been born with enough power that we don’t have to fight for it entirely; we don’t have to fight for it like our lives depend on it. Whiteness, regardless of our sexuality, religion, ability, age or class, is the ultimate fallback. The safety net of whiteness holds us tightly.
And yet, the fighting that we do learn–to stand up for ourselves, to speak out against white men and men in general, to use our voices to break down that code of niceness, domesticity, and submission with white men who have raised us and loved us, to learn to be allies, to release our internal oppression and find our voices, to create, to move from being arm pieces and objects into center stage–this fighting is necessary.
There is pleasure in learning how to fight for something you believe is right– the space to be myself, the freedom to live without fear, the chance to express my voice, beliefs, hopes, the encouragement to love who I love. And yet, fear can walk hand in hand with that pleasure. Fear that the fight will not result in the desired outcome. Fear that you’ll fail. Fear that you won’t even start.
Black writer, artist, teacher, and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara says, “The most effective way to do it is to do it.”
Perhaps some of us feel more pleasure in the starting of projects, and others feel more pleasure in the continuing, growing, finishing of them. I believe I’m a starter, learning to be a finisher, finding my step as I circle, circle, spiral between the oscillations.
My path of pleasure, of learning and unlearning, has had many mages along the way. There are women of color, and students of color, who have guided me along the shape of my change, yet the majority of my sisters, teachers, mentors have been white women. I have met the midwife, the herbalist, the poet, the climber, the singer, the artist, the revolutionary, the teacher, the hiker, the minister, the mother. These women—sisters, mothers, grandmothers—they guide me into thinking differently. How similar many of the roles are to the roles Alexis Pauline Gumbs lays out in her essay “Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes)” in brown’s book “Pleasure Activism.” Healing and creating and teaching are the common themes of women who guide us. I don’t believe this overlap to be accidental.
We heal when we crack; we crack when we fight; we fight when we speak; we speak because we love.
